SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH; A Wise Investment for Regents, State
By RESLER
If the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents does the right thing and agrees to create an independent school of public health at UW-Milwaukee, it will be making an investment that will likely reap huge economic and health dividends in the future.
Despite what some officials at the UW Medical School in Madison have suggested to the regents, the trend is decidedly not toward blending schools of medicine and public health as UW medical officials plan to do by changing the name of their school but rather keeping such schools independent of one another for the mutual interests of both.
The national growth in independent schools of public health is undeniable. In 1997, there were 29 such schools in the country with 14,736 students. Today, there are 37 independent schools of public health with more than 19,400 students.
Last year, 30 of the 37 accredited schools received almost $600 million in federal research grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to figures supplied by the Association of Schools of Public Health in Washington, D.C. The University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health received $36 million alone.
While medical schools have accredited public health programs, a school of public health must be independent of a medical school to be accredited.
And there’s no way that requirement is going to change any time soon, says Laura Rasar King, executive director of the Council on Education for Public Health, the national accrediting body. Those accreditation criteria were revised in June after a four-year review process, and if anything, they make the case even more strongly that to be accredited, a school of public health must be independent, King said.
And while accredited programs of public health in medical schools can qualify for research dollars, most go to independent schools.
“It’s a good investment,” Harrison Spencer, president and CEO of the Association of Schools of Public Health, told us. “You’re going to get good payback.”
He ought to know. He was dean of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans and before that dean of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in England.
“I can strongly say an independent school of public health is the model that’s most effective and works the best” in dealing with public health matters, Spencer said.
Independent schools of public health also make it easier to recruit the strongest public health faculty, said James Curran, dean of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, who is chairman of the Association of Schools of Public Health.
We have said all along that while a school of public health should be independent, it must work closely with Wisconsin’s two medical schools. Spencer and Curran could not agree more; both men, after all, are physicians.
And if the UW System is going to create such a school, Milwaukee’s poverty and overwhelming public health problems make UWM the logical choice.
UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago has said that with a relatively small investment, perhaps $10 million, UWM could create a school of public health by using current UWM faculty members already involved in public health. It then would be a matter of building upon that framework until the school could be accredited.
The regents must not let this opportunity slip away.
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